Speech disorders are one of the most prevalent disabilities in the world. Generally, speech disorders are classified as fluency disorders, voice disorders, motor speech disorders, and speech sound disorders. As one example, stuttering is classified as a fluency disorder in the rhythm of speech in which a person knows precisely what to say, but is unable to communicate or speak in accordance with his or her intent.
Many clinical therapy techniques for speech disorders are disclosed in the related art. Conventional techniques for treating speech disorders and, in particular, anti-stuttering techniques are commonly based on regulating the breath and controlling the rate of speech. To this end, speech therapists train their patients to improve their fluency. Such conventional techniques were found effective, in the short-term, as a speech disorder is predominantly a result of poorly coordinated speech production muscles.
In more details, one common stutter therapy technique is fluency shaping, in which a therapist trains a person (a stuttering patient) to improve his or her speech fluency through the altering of various motor skills. Such skills include the abilities to control breathing; to gently increase, at the beginning of each phrase, vocal volume and laryngeal vibration to speak slower and with prolonged vowel sounds; to enable continuous phonation; and to reduce articulatory pressure.
The speech motor skills are taught in the clinic while the therapist models the behavior and provides verbal feedback as the person learns to perform the motor skill. As the person develops speech motor control, the person increases rate and prosody of his or her speech until it sounds normal. During the final stage of the therapy, when the speech is fluent and sounds normal in the clinic, the person is trained to practice the acquired speech motor skills in his or her everyday life activities.
When fluency shaping therapy is successful, the stuttering is significantly improved or even eliminated. However, this therapy requires continuous training and practice in order to maintain effective speech fluency. As a result, the conventional techniques for practicing fluency shaping therapy are not effective for people suffering from stuttering. This is mainly because not all persons are capable of developing the target speech motor skills in the clinic, and even if such skills are developed, such skills are not easily transferable into everyday conversations. In other words, a patient can learn to speak fluently in the clinic, but will likely revert to stuttering outside of the clinic. Therefore, the continuous practicing of speech motor skills is key to successful fluency shaping therapy.
In the related art, various electronic devices are designed to improve the outcome of the anti-stuttering therapies, including fluency-shaping therapy. Examples for such devices include vocal amplitude rate-of-change device, a vocal pitch device, respiration monitors, and electromyographs (EMG). The vocal amplitude device is designed to train the loudness contour or gentle onset fluency shaping speech target.
A primary disadvantage of such devices is that they cannot be used to train patients remotely and, specifically, to remotely train speech motor skills that are essential for the success of a fluency shaping therapy. For example, the electromyography (EMG) device displays the activity of individual muscles. Using the EMG device outside of the clinics does not provide a real-time indication to the therapist of how the patient performs. Thus, the therapist cannot provide guidelines or modify the therapy session as the patient practices.
In addition, such devices are designed to aid the therapist during their therapy, As a result, a novice patient, individually practicing a fluency shaping technique cannot determine how good he or she performs. Furthermore, the currently available devices for monitoring the fluency shaping techniques are limited by their output, and in particular, outputs that can guide the user how to improve. For example, the EMG device would display the activity of individual muscles, but will not instruct the patient differently how to monitor the breathing.
In sum, the conventional solutions cannot efficiently implement procedures for fluency shaping therapy. For example, such solutions fail to provide any means for closely monitoring and providing real-time feedback to the patient practicing speech motor skills and overseeing the treatment. As another example, a patient having difficulty to perform one of the exercises may feel frustration, thereby increasing the fear and anxiety associated with patient stuttering. This would achieve the opposite effect of the desired outcome.
It would therefore be advantageous to provide an efficient solution for remote speech disorders therapy.